


Unembodied smiles after dark

by Baryshnikov



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, F/M, Failed Marriage, Infidelity, Memory gaps, Nyctophobia, Obsession, Ophidiophobia, Parasites, Rain, Self-Harm, Snakes, Tom is non-corporeal, Tom is not nice, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-03-21
Packaged: 2019-10-03 13:09:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17284664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Baryshnikov/pseuds/Baryshnikov
Summary: Ginny is just a little girl with something she doesn't know the name of stuck inside her head.





	1. Chapter 1

Ginny is a little girl. 

Ginny is a little girl who is afraid of the dark. She can’t help it. The dark is filled with nasty things, nasty cruel things that fill her head with nightmares. She doesn’t know how to tell them what she sees because she’s not sure if she’s really scared of it. It has a voice she recognises but can’t hear, like the warm honey she pours on her porridge, she can feel how it curls around her whispering her name but never saying what it wants. Eventually, she can’t sleep if she’s alone in the dark. Not when she knows there’s something there. She doesn’t have a name for it, but its there, hiding in the shadows waiting for her to turn light the out. Ron says she’s just doing it for attention, and her mother tells her to grow up, that big girls sleep in the dark. She didn’t feel like a big girl, not when there are eyes watching her, although she could never see them. So, she sleeps with the light on, its yellow glow dispelling the dark corners and the watchers that dwell in them. The light is her safety, the salvation from the thing without a name. The thing that makes her stomach twist in a way she doesn’t quite understand, the thing that makes her ache, the thing that makes her cry when everyone else has gone to sleep. 

Ginny is a little girl who is scared of snakes. She hates the sound they make when they slide across the ground. The others can’t hear it. They say she’s being crazy, that it’s silly to be scared of things like that. But she is. She hates their eyes and their stares and their sleek smooth scales that remind her of someone. They are so cold to touch, wrapping themselves around her arm and squeezing until she screams. The others don’t understand that someone she can’t remember has squeezed her arm like that before, made her skin go white and her heart beat so much faster. They don’t understand, and she doesn’t know how to make them understand. She hates snake’s hissing, it makes the hairs on her neck prickle and her hands shake, those hisses hover in her head for far longer than she would like. They speak to her, but she doesn’t know what they are saying. She doesn’t want to know. They sound like the monsters she used to think were under her bed, now she knows, those monsters are here, lurking in the dark, whispering to her. She knows it is his voice she hears in their hisses and she wishes he would just leave her alone, let her forget what she doesn’t really remember. 

Ginny is a little girl who wants to be clean. She didn’t know what it is she feels, deep inside her, a clawing, a squirming, a scratching, like insects beneath her skin. The sponge her mother gave her didn’t feel right anymore, it was too soft and too gentle against her skin, so instead, she used a scourer she found in the cupboard under the sink. It scratches her skin red raw and eases the ache inside her. Sometimes she isn’t so careful, and the mesh gets stuck in her stomach. Then with shaking fingers, and salted lips, she has to pull the wires out. She counts them: one, two, three, four, five, six. Ginny liked to imagine, it was that thing she didn’t have a name for, she was wrenching from her body. But it wasn’t. He was still inside her, and no amount of scrubbing could ever wash him away. Every time she showers it reminds her, that he will always be inside. It makes her stomach twist and everything hurt. When he does that, her hands always shake, and the water is too hot. She just sits with her forehead against the cold tiles begging him to leave her alone, begging for him to give her a way to be free of what she doesn’t understand. As if to remind her he will always be there it makes the ache so awful, biting and stinging and throbbing and scratching, somewhere deep inside her stomach. She couldn’t help biting her lip and crying, scrunching her eyes shut and hoping no one heard her. In those moments when the water was too hot, but her hands so cold, her fingers scraped along her thighs, guided by the thing she didn’t know the name of. Him. She didn’t know how she found that place between her thighs, only that she had, and it felt so good, and now she held her knees and let her fingers stroke and rub and fondle, and the water run down her back and burn her skin, and she didn’t care about any of it. She only cared for the bubbling under her skin, like magma, twisting and curling, tying itself in a knot over and over and over again. She only cared how she shuddered, breathless and not aching for just a second.  
Even after her showers, when she was away from the cold white tiles and burning water, and secret things that felt so good, Ginny felt dirty.

Ginny is a little girl who doesn’t understand what’s inside her. Although whatever it is, she knew she was scared if it. She couldn’t remember when she heard his name again. The name that encompassed everything that she was feeling. Tom. Her twin. The thing she doesn’t remember but knows she knows. She hates him, though she doesn’t know why, despises his name, so simple and common and yet so filled with something that makes her want to cry. She tried to get rid of him once when she was so angry at the way he twisted her thoughts and turned everything upside down. She sat sobbing in the corner after dark. Alone with the knife, her mother used to cut the meat. Ginny knew she could do that too. Gouge and carve and slice until Tom was no longer inside her. She never thought it would hurt so much to have holes in her stomach, holes that oozed blood, all sticky and red. But Tom was still inside her and now he was laughing. It was sound she knew but couldn’t place, all distant and echoey, filled with horrible memories of things she didn’t think had happened. She hated him, hated him laughing at her when she cried alone in the dark with gaping holes in her stomach and blood on her hands. She hated him and yet she couldn’t imagine living without him. Then there would be spaces, voids, great gaps in her heart. Although she couldn’t remember where he came from, he was part of her now, so much of a part that he would never go away, no matter how deep she gauged, or how long she cried, or how much she hated him. Tom would always be there, and he said that didn’t have to be a bad thing, and in the dark, all alone, she believed him. 

Ginny is just a normal little girl. 

 

Except she isn’t.


	2. Chapter 2

Ginny is a teenager. 

Ginny is a teenager who doesn’t sleep. She always says there are more important things that she needs to be doing than sleeping. There aren’t. She just doesn’t want to sleep because when she sleeps, she dreams of him. Every night he lurks at the back of her head, just waiting for her to close her eyes and let him in. If Ginny does, she knows she’ll regret it. Tom isn’t nice at the best of times, but she’s learnt he can be particularly nasty is he wants to, he can scratch the corners of her mind to shreds if he wants. He can make her dream of horrid things, vile things that make her sick and curious. Dreams made of blood and snakes and endless darkness, of all the things he knows she hates. But that’s what Tom’s like. He always does what hurts the most, always tries to be cruel simply because he can, simply because it makes him feel special. Ginny hates him for it. Hates that she’s still scared of him, but she hates more that she wants to understand him. She may not like to sleep but when she does, she gets to see that little bit more of him, almost like a reward for her obedience, he comes to her as no more than a shadow and tells her why he does things, why he did them to _her_. He says she’s so special to him. That she’s not like anyone else he’s ever had. Ginny is not sure that she likes his midnight confessions and when he senses that, he becomes hateful, and spiteful, and ever so vicious. He leaves long red lines all over her skin, scratches that itch, scratches that are still there when she wakes up. Long red painful lines along her thighs that no one else can see, but will forever reminding her that he won’t ever leave her alone. 

Ginny is a teenager who lies to people. She doesn’t tell people where’s she’s going because it’s better that they don’t know. They’d only worry if they knew the things she did. So, Ginny doesn’t tell them, it’s a kindness on her part really, an act of compassion to spare them having to live with him too. She likes to sit on the window ledge and look down at the world below. She likes to wonder what it would be like to fall so far down, to hit her face on the rocks and crumple up her body. Tom tells her not to, and she listens to him. They both know it’s not real concern, that he only keeps her alive because without her body he’d be as good as dead. But she still smiles when he says it. Perhaps that was the beginning of their tolerant but acrimonious relationship. Him hating her, her hating him, but both knowing that without one another they would be lonely. That they were the only two who could understand each other, that’s she’s more like him that she cares to admit. Ginny disagrees. She is not like him, he is heartless when she is caring, he is cold when she is warm, he is unfeeling when she is sympathetic. They are not alike. He just sighs and says that one day she’ll see. Between them a compromise seems to form, as long as doesn’t ignore him, then he won’t be mean for the sake of it. He’ll talk to her when she’s lonely, though she’s not always grateful for that because he always complains. Always tells her it’s her fault that he’s stuck in her head, that there are places he’d much rather be, people he’d much rather infect. But he’s stuck with her just as much as she’s stuck with him. She tells him that she didn’t ask for him inside her head, that he chose her and now they should just get on with their lives. It’s not a comfort though because she knows they can’t just pretend the other doesn’t exist, not when they are so intimately connected. 

Ginny is a teenager who is still learning about herself. She is sure that other girls experiment with their fingers in their rooms when the doors are shut, and all the lights are out. She is not so sure that other girls hear the voice of a boy they’ve known ever since they can remember, a boy who’s inhabited their bodies, a boy who’s like a monster that is stuck inside her heads. But _she_ does. She thinks of Tom. She _always_ thinks of Tom. Ginny only kisses other boys because those other boys look like him. She only kisses people who look like him. He says he’s flattered that she likes dark hair, and dark eyes, and words that stain the air long after they’re gone. But none of the people she kisses feel right, they are nothing but poor imitations of what she wants, so she closes her eyes and has to pretend. Has to listen to him speak just to find what she wants in her rotten doppelgangers, has to listen to his stories and play pretend, make these people into something they’re not. When she kisses boys in the corridor or in the stairway, she imagines the walls are colder and wetter, that there is a clamminess to her skin and a coldness to their lips. She imagines that these people are stronger, that they could hold her still, she imagines that they could speak poetry, and that they have eyes that could swallow her whole. But they don’t have these things, they are only human, only mortal, only corporeal. They do not have spiders for hands and sickly-sweet verses lining their mouths. They’re just teenage boys that she lets kiss her because she’s bored. Tom enjoys it, he says he tastes them just as she does, sees them, smells them, feels them just as she does. He says they are so disappointing. Ginny doesn’t ask how he would know. Instead she just puts up with him. Not that it matters because none of those half-hearted doppelgangers brings her anything other than a reputation. Ginny is a slut. That’s what people say. She ruins relationships, takes what she wants just because she can. Ginny doesn’t care, not anymore. She’s just searching for someone, looking for a way to satisfy the ache in her stomach for someone who doesn’t exist.

Ginny is a teenager who likes the rain. When it rains, she goes outside in just a t-shirt, although everyone always tells her not to. Out there when the water drips from the sky she feels a connection to Tom; it brings back memories of the cold and the damp of that place people still don’t like to say the name of in front of her. The droplets feel like his fingers sliding down her back, his cold hands on her cheek, touching her like he did when she was young. If she looks up at the churning clouds, she cannot help but see his face, and when the lightning strikes it is like his smile shattering the sky and splintering her heart. Her mouth is always so dry when it rains, so she sticks out her tongue and tries to catch the drops, tries to imagine what it would be like to see him standing beside her for real, to have him walk with her, to have him kiss her because everything seems to be about kissing when you’re a teenager. It doesn’t matter that she’s shivering in the rain, or that’s she’s soaked through, she won’t go inside until she feels just like him. So cold and powerful, like he’s playing around inside her again. There’s never anyone to stop her sitting down in the sodden grass, lying back in the water-logged sludge, tracing the earth with her fingers, leaving mud beneath her nails. When she lies like that, she feels just like him, so organic and natural, so pure and crude, as if she is a baby born from the earth. Ginny wonders in those moments whether perhaps they are more similar than she’s like to admit, after all they both know what they want, and they both know they won’t stop until they get it. Tom smiles when she says that, smiles and says he wishes he could sit with her in the flesh, but that this is the best they can do for now. Ginny knows she agrees with him, but that doesn’t mean couldn’t just lie there for hours under the black sky with Tom stroking away her tears. 

Ginny is just a normal teenager. 

 

Except she isn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

Ginny is a grown woman. 

Ginny is a grown woman who sees things that aren’t there. But she doesn’t tell people because they would say it all happened so long ago. So, she keeps it to herself that she now sees Tom walking beside her. She keeps it to herself that he smiles at her, she sees that dry ice smile everywhere: in every glass, on every face, even in the mirror when she brushes her hair. She hates herself for smiling back. Ginny doesn’t tell people how loud his voice is these days, that the words he speaks are no longer just inside her head, that she likes his lovely silver tongue spinning sleek spiderwebs, all silky and smooth like her satin dress. Tom is so good at smiling and telling her how she’s grown to be so beautiful, though he thinks she sometimes looks too proper, too refined when she’s dressed up so nice. The little girl he knew wasn’t meant to grow up so polished. She was meant to be all rough and raw, soil under her nails and a lightning storm in her hear. It is in her nature he says, to be wild, to be dangerous and fun and pushing every limit; flying too high, standing too close to the edge, living life too fast and hoping to die too young. Ginny ignores him. More than ignores him, she pushes Tom away. She’s not so young anymore, not so small and weak, she doesn’t have to put up with him inside her head as if he can control her every thought. He was barely even a memory if she thought about it, just a vision that shouldn’t be there, just a vision that wanted more than it would ever deserve. She was proud of herself for telling him that, for telling him she didn’t need him anymore, that she didn’t want him anymore. That it was _her_ body and he was no longer welcome. Tom didn’t like that. His eyes were that much darker and there was something about him that made her uncomfortable, something that kept her staring in the mirror long after she should have gone. It shocked them both when he touched her when she was awake. Everything shifted then. No longer was he a mere projection, a trick of the light, a problem inside her head. Now he was as real as the long red lines he left along her arm. Real and painful and nasty. But where once she might have cowered now, she could only stand her ground. Stare at him with that burning anger licking every inch of her, whilst he stared back, his cold burrowing as deep as a permafrost. When people saw her fuming they always asked her when she was going to grow up, leave behind these mood swings and petty feuds, leave behind all these passions that better suited youths; when was she going to understand that she was a grown woman now, and women needed to be a little more respectable. Tom always laughed when those people spoke. Laughed and said he liked her intensity, like her devotion and fervour and dedication. Ginny liked it too, liked not listening to people, liked doing as she pleased, liked the things he said when he was sprawled on her chair watching her get ready. Perhaps she even liked the way his eyes dragged over her when she wore that dress, he said he liked, and he spoke of darker things that he thought she wouldn’t like. 

Ginny is a grown woman who got married for the wrong reasons. She married because that’s what everyone expected her to do. When Harry proposed to her at her birthday, when everyone was congratulating them before she’d said anything, she couldn’t refuse. Anyway, Harry was a good man, that’s what everyone said, so sweet and gentle and perfect. They all just seemed so happy for them that she couldn’t say that she didn’t love Harry as much as she used to, and that he wouldn’t love her if he knew the real her. But he didn’t know about that side of her because she never showed him. A part of Ginny thought that when they lived together, maybe Harry would see that she saw things that weren’t there. That he would see Tom everywhere, his signature smile dripping down all the walls and infecting every surface. Harry didn’t see. Harry didn’t see anything. Harry would never see anything because Harry thought the war had been won and that the bad things were gone from the world. Somehow, Harry only ever saw the best things in people, saw the goodness and the virtue, he never saw the truth. Ginny wished that she could tell him that there were so many bad things in the world, that one of them lurked inside her head, that the bad things were spilling, like the red wine they drank at the wedding reception, across their lives. The wedding day was the worst, her mouth still ached from faking smiles and pretending that she couldn’t feel Tom standing too close behind her. Her most vivid memory of that day was standing over the bathroom sink, psyching and shivering and feeling sick. Tom had stood too close, his fingers trailing down the sleeve of her pretty dress, telling her how pretty she looked, how pretty and how _boring_. The perfect wife for the perfect hero, a perfect childhood friendship that had blossomed into the perfect romance. That was when she tried to wash her hands, wash him off her skin like she did when she was a little girl, but he only laughed, as he had done then. His face was in the mirror, but his mouth was hot against her ear when he told her she couldn’t get rid of what was already buried deep inside her. She hit that mirror until her knuckles were bleeding and she couldn’t feel her fingers, then she walked down the aisle and hoped Harry wouldn’t see the bloodstains on her gloves. He didn’t. Harry never saw anything. It hadn’t taken long to learn that being married to Harry was worse than dating him, he suffocated her with love, with constant displays of such mushy affections, reminding her how lucky he felt to have met someone like her. It was exhausting pretending to be in love, pretending that she liked the constant smothering he called _love_. And still, he didn’t see. Harry didn’t see that she’s mad, that her body is stained with monsters. He couldn’t see how Tom lurked in their home, waiting. Ginny did. Ginny couldn’t help but see. See how Tom’s hands are always there, nails scratching her husband’s shadow just because he can, all because he thinks that Ginny wants something else because Ginny has monsters in her heart.

Ginny is a grown woman who is having an affair. She knew it was wrong even before they did anything. She knew that it would break Harry’s heart and maybe that’s what she wanted, for him to see exactly what she is. To give him a good reason to leave her, to give him a good reason to live a happy life with someone who loves him. The man she met after work is called Tom, well he’s not, but she called him Tom. He was handsome, all harsh lines and sharp edges that she could cut her tongue on. He has strong fingers and holds her throat when they’re fucking. She knows he likes her red hair and doesn’t care when she begs for someone he isn’t, he just likes her for what she is, not like Harry. Harry wants her to be things, he sees her as things she isn’t, all perfect and pretty, straight edges and straight lines. Tom likes her wild eyes and scrawling streaks. Tom likes her nails in his shoulders, likes how she makes his lips bleed, likes her flawed heart and the monsters in her head. But he isn’t perfect. The Tom in her head is so much better, so much crueller, so much nastier, a noxious creature that has her heart choking in his fumes. The Tom in her head thinks his replacement pales in comparison, thinks he is too nice, too kind to a woman whose heart is just a void. She agrees. She leaves new Tom and finds another. The new new Tom has the right voice and the right tongue, talking her down twisting lanes into the dark. He lets her do things to him, taking exactly what she wants with no strings attached. Though sometimes he ruins it. Sometimes he wants to talk about feelings, how much he loves her, how much he would like to marry her. Her Tom would never talk about how she feels because her Tom already knows. They are part of one another, so closely connected they don’t need to even speak to know what they want. She leaves this Tom alone like the last. Ginny never expected to find another one, but by now she knows where to look, and her Tom helps. This Tom has his delicate fingers and the cold strand of cruelty running so close to the surface. She knows just how to kiss her, how to drag all her monsters to the surface with just a few words. She’s so good at making Ginny’s skin burn and her stomach twist, so good at making blood on her hands feel so nice. Ginny has never felt as good as she does when she’s lying on her bed with her newest Tom between her legs, doing things with her tongue that makes Ginny writhe, and her real Tom lying beside her, stroking her face and telling her what a good girl she is. But even that new Tom couldn’t give her all the nasty things she wanted. She leaves her just like all the others. Leaves her and goes back to her Tom. Goes back to him smiling and watching her undress, goes back to standing in the shower with the water burning her back and his fingers guiding her own. 

Ginny is a grown woman who hungers for someone. She still feels him tugging on her heart, begging her to do something so atrocious that she will find him again. She knows he’s so bad, an addiction she could never admit to, the only real monster she’s ever known. She also knows she will never be free of him, he is more than just a part of her now, he is her life. When she stares in the mirror, she sees his face pictured alongside her own, his eyes merging with her sockets, his smile merging with her mouth. She hates him for what he has done, for what he has turned her into. But he refuses to be blamed, he says that it is just as much her fault as it is his. That she can take the blame because he didn’t make anything new inside her, he only let out what was already there. Ginny hates that he’s probably right, that the madness that lurks inside her has always been there, long before Tom ha the opportunity to rip her all to pieces. The thing she hates the most though, is that he seems to be the only one who understands her, understands what it’s like to feel empty, to feel nothing but an abyss, an endless vacuum sucking all the love out of her life. Tom knows what it’s like to feel like a monster because he’s one too. He knows what it is to feel disgusting and abhorrent and just so special. Every time Harry’s away saving the world and she’s alone eating dinner with Tom sitting opposite, Ginny tells herself that she’ll stop encouraging him. But she never does. She likes him too much now. She likes to look into his eyes when he pushes her against the wall of the dining room where anyone who cares to look can see. She likes the threatening shade of red that glazes his eyes when he says she looks gorgeous. She likes to hear him whisper all those things to her, the same things he’s always said ever since she was a little girl. Just her name over and over and over again; cutting it open with his tongue and spilling all the sentiment out. Ginny likes his hands on her throat, pressing too hard and making her forget herself. But she also likes her hands in his hair, nails digging into the back of his neck, leaving those marks that don’t feel right on anybody else. The best moments are when he’s so close, knuckles clenched, mouth just below her ear, reminding her what she is to him, what he is to her, reminding her that no one else could ever understand what they feel for each other. That they are special and no one else will ever truly _understands_. They couldn’t even imagine it, he tells her, mouth against hers, hand reaching for the light. In the dark, he murmurs that he’s so happy with what she’s become, that she has turned out to be exactly how he hoped she would, exactly as he dreamt she could be, all those years ago. 

Ginny is just a normal grown woman. 

 

Except she isn’t. 

 

She’s still just a little girl who is afraid of the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first time writing this pairing so I hope it isn't too awful.


End file.
